Dear Friends,
Here is an interesting article about one major university system that is thinking about the unthinkable.  I don't support this idea, but it does focus one's attention on how bad things are getting.
 
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/10/26/colorado
 
Harry Pence

________________________________

From: Teaching Breakfast List on behalf of Jim Greenberg
Sent: Mon 10/26/2009 9:39 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: FW: Warmth, Competence, and Trust


From the Outdoor Ed. program at Cornell U (Mark Holton).  Worth thinking about in Indoor Ed. 

Cheers, 

Jim Greenberg


Warmth, Competence and Trust

In our new staff orientation we often point to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs to explain why you should keep your students warm and fed before trying to help them with distant higher functions such as teamwork, bonding and trust.  But recent research has brought two of those needs much closer together than Abraham ever expected. Several recent studies suggest that a part of the brain called the insular cortex is intimately involved in the sensing of both physical temperature and interpersonal warmth (trust) information.  These studies draw  upon almost a century of research, during which time two lines of inquiry have been slowly growing together.

The long version: (or skip to the end for The Bottom Line, and links to .pdfs)

Wamth

Part of the story starts with Solomon Asch in 1946.  (Some of you may remember hearing about this guy during Professor Dunning's presentation on self-assessment.)  Asch did some clever experiments which showed that the terms "warm" and "cold" play a central role in how we form impressions of people.  Here's what he did:  He gave students a bunch of terms describing someone. The lists also included the terms "warm" or "cold".  What he noticed was that people's impressions don't change very much when you fiddle around with most descriptive terms, but when you fiddle around with warm or cold, the change was great.  For example, a warm and intelligent person you might characterize as wise, but a cold and intelligent person is more likely to be called sly or devious.  For some reason the ideas of warm and cold are critical in making impressions of people.  But why? Linguists thought it might be because we organize our language to metaphorically reflect our physical sensations.  Others thought that linking our mental and physical worlds in that way was a nutty idea.  

Competence

In 1968, another quality emerged with similarly central influence on one's impression of a person.  The new measure had many different names at first, but they all had the sense of "competence" or "incompetence".  Lots of studies have since confirmed the primacy of warmth and competence in our judgments of character.  It turns out that our perceptions of people are determined to an astonishing extent solely by these measures. 

The evolutionary biologist types made the argument that the warmth/competence measures were evolved solutions to the millennia old problem of encountering strangers.  They speculated that the first thing we wanted to know about that new ape on the Savannah was whether or not he was friendly.  Whose interests does he have in mind? Yours or his?   In essence, warm toward you or cold toward you? The next thing we wanted to know was whether that ape was capable of doing whatever it was we suspected he might have been up to.  In other words, was he competent or incompetent?

Countless more experiments determined more things about warmth and competence:

        Of the two measures, people are generally more concerned with warmth than competence.
        We are capable of assessing warmth more rapidly than competence - in milliseconds!
        Women's assessments tend to put even more emphasis on warmth than do men.
        Assessments by individualists tend to put more emphasis on competence than warmth.
        Narratives of socially ambiguous scenes are judged more by competence standards if the narrative is in first person, more by warmth standards if they are framed in third person. 
        These judgments occur unconsciously.
        
The warmth/competence paradigm was even found to apply to group stereotypes.  US participants tended to identify test groups with the broad categories of "warm and competent" (housewives, the Irish) , "warm and incompetent" ( the disabled,  the elderly), "cold and competent" (the rich, the British), and "cold and incompetent" (the homeless, welfare recipients).

Trust

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, another famous scientist began his research on human bonding.  Or actually Monkey bonding.  Many of you might be familiar with the attachment experiments done by a fellow named Harlow back in the 50's.  He took innocent baby monkeys away from their real mothers and raised them on various model surrogate mothers made of bare or terry cloth covered wire mesh.  What he determined seems fairly obvious to people these days:  it's not just the food that makes babies like their mothers.  Babies, it turns out, like to be picked up, cuddled, and held.  Brilliant! Harlow gets a National Medal of Science, becomes the president of the APA, has three wives, four kids and dies in 1981.

He's a bit of a controversial character, as the monkeys that he raised with bare wire mesh cage mothers all went more or less insane.  It sounds kinda macabre, but it probably saved you all from the same kind of infanthood that your grandparents suffered, as it eventually had a great effect on baby rearing practices.  If you've never read Harlow's The Nature of Love, it's worth a look.  (Even if it is just for the shock value of the rampant sexism.)    

In any case, what has this to do with warmth?  Well...in addition to snuggly terry cloth bodies with faces, the version of a surrogate mother the innocent baby monkeys preferred was heated from inside with a light bulb.  I don't think warmth was specific focus of the research per se, but it was the first case I'm aware of that linked the physical sensation of warmth and trust.

So here's a question:  Where does our physical sense of temperature reside in our brains?  Temperature sensing had been thought of as a part of the sense of touch - located in the parietal somatosensory cortices.  But brain scans implicated a whole other region - the insular cortex.  That's surprising, eh?  What's it doing there?   And what else does that part of your brain do? Interestingly, the insula was found to play an important role processing emotions associated with societal exclusion, and alienation, and also in emotional decision making in economic trust games.  Similarly, Borderline Personality Disorder has been associated with abnormal activity in this same area. 

If the physical sensation of warmth and feelings of trust are processed by the same part of the brain, then the logical next question was, "Can one effect the other?"  And dang it all,  they do.  A recent study had participants read a list of qualities and rate the warmth of a person.  However, in the elevator on the way up to the laboratory a confederate asked the participant to hold a cup of coffee for a moment.  Some got a hot coffee some got a cold cup.  Amazingly, the participants who held the warm cup of coffee rated the person more warmly.  Those who held cold coffee rated the very same terms as describing someone more cold.

What does this mean for us?

The Bottom Line:

1) In your first meeting with your students, they will assess you almost instantly on two qualities - your personal warmth and your competence - and those two qualities will determine how something like 3/4 of your initial interactions are interpreted,  i.e., this assessment will likely determine how they feel about you.

Warm and Competent - Admiration
Warm and Incompetent - Pity
Cold and Competent - Envy
Cold and Incompetent - Contempt

2) We used to think of keeping people warm as a task separate from developing trust, something one had to accomplish before turning to the other task.  Now we know that they are intimately linked.  That keeping people warm (snuggly, giving them a hot drink) actually actively predisposes people to trust.

-M.

Asch http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/425/asch.pdf
Harlow http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/427/Classic%20Monkey%20Business.pdf 
Competence Identified http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/436/warmth%20AND%20competence%20identified.pdf 
Group Stereotypes http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/428/warmth%20and%20the%20BIAS%20model.pdf 
Borderline Personality Disorder http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/430/insula%20and%20personality%20disorder.pdf 
Economic Games and Trust http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/438/ecconomics%20insula%20trust.pdf
 <http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/438/ecconomics%20insula%20trust.pdf> Language and Reality http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/431/language%20and%20reality.pdf
 <http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/431/language%20and%20reality.pdf> Neurobio of Attachment http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/432/neurobio%20of%20attachment.pdf
 <http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/432/neurobio%20of%20attachment.pdf> Physical and Interpersonal warmth linked http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/433/physcial%20and%20interpersonal%20warmth%20linked.pdf 
Thermal Sensing http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/434/thermal%20sensing%20and%20insular%20cortex.pdf
 <http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/434/thermal%20sensing%20and%20insular%20cortex.pdf> Other warmth / competence info http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/435/warmth%20and%20competence%20details.pdf
<http://intranet.coe.cornell.edu/docs/435/warmth%20and%20competence%20details.pdf>